Without further ado, let's begin part two of 5 at the Northern Crusade and the Battle of Lake

Papers.

The Order of Brothers at the German House of St Mary in Jerusalem, more commonly known in

English as the Teutonic Order, is a Catholic religious order,

originally founded to support the Crusaders of the Holy Land.

Their origins date back to the years after the disastrous defeat against Saladin at the Battle

of Hatene in 1187.

Of the gawaring two-year-long siege of A Aker 1189 to 1191, the Crusaders were desperately

short, not only of fighting men, but of effective medical care.

The regular hospital units were overburdened, and the hospitalers favoured their own

nationals, the English and the French, leaving the Germans to their own devices.

Consequently, a group of middle-ranking crusaders from the cities of Bremen and Lubeck took it upon themselves to establish a new hospital order who would take care of the German sick.

They gained the support of their emperor, Henry the Six, who in turn won over the of the German Sikh.

They gained the support of their Emperor, Henry the Six, who in turn won over the patriarch

of Jerusalem and also the two established orders, the Hospitlers and the Templars.

Within a few years their hospital was flourishing, not only caring for the ill but providing

hostels for new arrivals,

and money and food for those who were in need, such as individuals who had been robbed or had been

injured in battle. A significant contingent of its members came from Bremen, a fast-growing city port on the

North Sea. As time went on, the new order also began to assume certain

much-needed military functions, such as providing garrisons for frontier castles, and so

requested Pope Celestine III to approve its status as a military order.

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